Customer premises equipment (CPE) devices are for example residential gateways, routers, switches, telephones, set-top boxes, etc. Residential gateways are nowadays widely used to connect devices in a home of a customer to the Internet or to any other wide area network (WAN). Residential gateways use for example digital subscriber line (DSL) technology that enables a high data rate transmission over copper lines, or use optical fiber broadband transmission systems, for example fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) and fiber-to-the premises (FTTP).
Network service providers (NSP), also some Internet service providers (ISP), may have to manage a large amount, up to millions, of CPE devices that they deployed as part of their service, e.g. for broadband Internet access or IPTV. Remote management of CPE devices can be achieved by means of a central configuration server (CCS), which interacts with individual CPE devices to provide them with configuration settings and to extract diagnostics information by using a specific application layer protocol.
A widely used example of a CPE remote management communication protocol is known as the CPE WAN management protocol (CWMP), which was developed by the Broadband Forum and defined by a technical report number 069, also commonly referred to as TR-069. The CWMP defines an application layer protocol for remote management of CPE devices, by providing a communication protocol between the CPE devices and an auto configuration server (ACS).
A wide area network of this kind providing broadband services for CPE devices is schematically shown in FIG. 1: a network service provider network 1 is arranged for providing Internet services to a multitude of residential gateways 2 and set-top boxes 3 via a broadband connection 5, e.g. DSL/Cable/Fibres, . . . . In addition, the NSP network 1 includes an ACS 4 for remotely managing the residential gateways 2 and set-top boxes 3. By using the TR-069 protocol, the ACS 4 is capable for example of auto configuration and dynamic service provisioning, software/firmware image management, status and performance monitoring and diagnostics for the residential gateways 2 and set-top boxes 3.
CWMP, also other protocols such as for example OMA Device Management or web service based protocols, work in a “traditional” client/server and request/response model. A device acting as a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client connects to one or a cluster of HTTP servers and sends a HTTP request, and the server or the cluster responds with a HTTP response. CWMP is correspondingly applying the same principles as the World Wide Web serving web (HTML) pages.
Recently, there are evolutions in scope of the upcoming HTML5 standard, see http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/, and there is a new web sockets protocol under definition: “http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-hybi-thewebsocketprotocol-17” with contributions by the W3C. Web sockets support full duplex, bidirectional communication between a web socket client and server, going beyond the traditional request/response model, although there are intermediate non-standard mechanisms for a server to send data to clients, examples include comet: http://svn.cometd.com/trunk/bayeux/bayeux.html, http long poll . . . .
There are a number of significant constraints and problems with a fully centralized server containing all management related logic and the HTTP request/response model:                Scalability is a challenge in a centralized server model once millions of devices frequently connect to the server (sending requests) and helpdesks and other entities need to go through the server for a number of applications (monitoring, diagnostics . . . ),        As fast as possible communication from the ACS or another backend application to a particular device is problematic. E.g. TR-069 defines a connection request mechanism in which the ACS sends a HTTP request to the CPE and authenticates, typically using HTTP digest authentication, after which the CPE device connects to the ACS sending HTTP requests,        Interrogation of a large number of CPE devices requires the central server to contact each and individually go through request/response iterations to collect the data and analyze these collected data on server side,        All logic is centralized in one place, e.g. the ACS server, meaning:                    The ACS server needs to issue commands to devices over a potentially slow network connection.            The ACS server needs to await response from a CPE device (success/failure and possibly requested data), analyze this result and based upon the result decide which next step to take.            Perform this logic, which is typically common for a very large number of CPE devices, for each individual CPE device.                        
US 2010/0235433 A1 describes a service management system communicating via a wide area network with gateway devices at various user premises, to remotely manage delivery of application services and/or features thereof by the gateway device based on service subscriptions of customers associated with the gateway devices. A subscription manager provides information through the WAN identifying the application services or features to be enabled, to each respective gateway device. A service manager controlled by the subscription manager distributes service specific configuration data to logic implementing service functionality for the application services in the gateway devices, responsive to requests from the gateway devices.
The publication “Push vs. Pull in WEB-Based Network Management” by Jean-Philippe Martin-Flatin, Lausanne, Switzerland, Technical Report SSC/1998/022, describes Network Management application designs. A first, a pull model, is based on a request/response paradigm. A second, a push model, relies on the publish/subscribe paradigm, which allows administrators to conserve network bandwidth as well as CPU time on the management station. A third model introduces the concept of a collapsed network management platform, wherein the above two models coexist.